A LITTLE WHITE DOG
"There!" Elinor cried. "Now, how could you be so careless, Ted?"
"The blessed thing must have jumped of its own accord off the chimney-piece," Ted said. He looked down at his wife on her knees beside him, ruefully collecting the fragments of the broken vase. "I wasn't so much as looking at it, Nell."
"No! If you'd only had the sense to look at it!" Nell sighed. "But youwillstand with your heels on the fender, and you push those great shoulders of yours against the chimney-board, and smash go all my ornaments—and a lot you care! However, something had to break to-day, and it might have been worse."
"How do you mean 'had to'?"
"That great awkward Emily threw down a soup-plate last night; and I——"
"No, not you, surely, Nell?"
"It wasn't my fault, of course. I was lifting the hand-glass from my dressing-table as carefully as carefully, and it just dropped out of my hands! 'That is the second,' I said to myself; 'now I wonder what the third will be.'"
"And why did you say anything so silly?"
"Have you actually grown to your enormous age, and not known that when one thing is broken in a house three are broken? Well, you have had an ineffectual sort of education!"
"You don't believe such rotten rubbish?"
"Don't you? When I tell you of the soup-plate, the hand-mirror, and now this vase? You can't call it nonsense, because there it is. A proof before your very eyes. You might as well say it isn't unlucky to see a single crow——"
"I'd sooner see one of the mischievous brutes any day than fifty."
"—That you may expect things to go pleasantly on the day you put on your petticoat the wrong side out——"
"I should expect them to take a comic turn on the day I did that, certainly!"
"What a ribald boy! Now, listen, Ted; be very attentive, and I will tell you a true, true story. You mustn't laugh the tiniest titter—ah, now, Ted! you won't laugh, will you?"
They were very young married people, and were not yet disposed to sit quietly apart and talk to each other. She seized him by the lapels of his coat now, and shook him to attention, while he, looking down upon her with the hardly yet familiar pride of possession in his boyish eyes, swayed his big frame in her grasp, flatteringly yielding to her small efforts.
"Are you going to attend, sir? Well, then—There was once a young man——"
"Who met a small vixen called Nell, and she fell in love with him and made him marry her."
"Ah, now, Ted, do listen!—A young man, and his mother told him never to walk under a ladder."
"And he did, naughty youth, and a bricklayer fell on him, and he died?"
She pleaded with him. "Seriously, Ted; no nonsense!" So he grasped her by the elbows and looked gravely in her face.
"It was mother's cousin Harold—really and truly—not a make-up."
"Hurry up, darling. I'm swallowing every word, and it's most awfully interesting."
"And he didn't believe that kind of thing—just like you, you know—ladders, and crows, and petticoats, and things. And he was going out to the West Indies to an awfully good appointment—hundreds a year! And his mother went for a walk with him on the last day. And they were building a row of houses——"
"Cousin Harold and his mother?"
"No.Youknow. And his mother said, 'Don't go under the ladder, dear'—and he did."
"Naughty boy! Naughty Cousin Harold!"
"You're laughing! Very well, just wait. To tease her, he would. 'Now, look here,' he said, 'every ladder I come to I mean to go undertwice.' And he did. And his mother couldn't stop him, and she cried. And—that's all——"
"All? But where's the point?"
"I didn't say there was a point. You know about mother's Cousin Harold."
"I'm hanged if I do."
"He never, never came back."
"Goodness!"
"He never even got there."
"Break it gently, Nell."
"The ship he went in sank, and no one escaped to tell the dreadful tale."
"And supposing he hadn't walked under ladders, but was alive in the West Indies, what relation would he be to you and to me?"
She was proceeding to tell him in all good faith, but he stopped her. "And now," he said, "I will tell you a tale. But first, as my feelings have been considerably harassed, I will solace myself with a pipe."
She was being taught to fill his pipe, and to light it, and on this occasion was made to take a couple of draws to prove to herself that she had not properly cleaned it with the hairpin, according to instructions given last night. So that the story was long delayed, and when at length it came it did not amount to much.
"There was once an old man who gave a dinner-party."
"That was daddy," Elinor said, from the arm of the chair where she was now sitting with her shoulder against his.
"It was on the occasion of the marriage of his only daughter to a handsome and agreeable young man, the most eligible parti of the neighbourhood."
"That was you and me," Nell explained, contentedly. "Well, you are a vain old boy!"
"No interruptions, please," Ted went on, pulling at his pipe. "Although the occasion was one of rejoicing, there was a melancholy circumstance connected with it which cast a shadow over the otherwise sunshiny—'m—sunshine of the scene."
"You're as bad as a newspaper. Go on softly, or you'll never keep it up. I can't think what's coming."
"The guests sat down thirteen to table——"
"Well, so they did!" Nell recalled. "Now, that is really very clever of you, Ted. I'd quite forgotten. I was horribly frightened then—but I'd as clean as clean forgotten!"
"Well, there you are!" Ted said. "There's your moral."
"Where? Where?"
"Why, here we are, all alive and well and kicking; you and me, your daddy and mummy, your uncles and your cousins and your aunts."
"But supposing one of us wasn't!" Nell remarked sagely. "When you ask your thirteen to dinner and one dies it must be horrid; and I should think your guests might—might bring an action against you."
She was holding the hand he had just put up to meet hers, which was round his neck now, and a thought suddenly struck her. "But the year isn't up yet, Ted," she said.
The dinner had been an epoch in their young lives; they both remembered the date was the eighteenth of October. He pointed to the silver calendar on the chimney-piece, to which the parlour-maid attended. "This is the eighteenth again," Ted said. "There aren't two eighteenths of October in one year."
Elinor was back in memories of the event. "Do you remember Aunt Carrie, and how ill she was? At the very verge of the grave. And how afraid mummy was she should notice there were thirteen? Now, here she is as well as any of us, and going to get married again. Ah! What are you doing, Ted?
"No, Ted! Oh, no, please! My hair will come down!"
"I'm getting another hairpin."
It was such pretty hair, he was always pleased to see it hanging about her ears, as had been its fashion when he had first met her—not so long ago. So he fought her for the hairpin while she ducked her head and threw it backwards, and laughed, and struggled in his grasp; to submit, of course, at last, to yield up the hairpin, to roast it, red hot in the fire, to watch it burn its malodorous passage through his pipe.
That ceremony over, she got him his boots, and would have laced them for him, and kissed them too, if he would have let her, and did grovel at his feet to arrange the roll of his stockings for him.
"Youhavegot nice calves, Ted!" she told him. "I don't think I could love even you if you had sticks of things like Robert Anstey's."
"Oh, Bob's legs'll do all right," Ted said, loyally. He stamped a foot into the second boot, and in doing so ground some of the broken vase beneath his heel. He filliped her cheek, then, smiling into her eyes—
"You and your old woman's superstitions!" he said. "Perhaps you don't know I've a—what d'ye call it?—a portent in my own family—or had when I had a family," he told her, bending again over his boot. "Well, I have, then!"
"And what's a portent, silly? I daresay it's nothing to boast of."
"It's a little—white—DOG!"
He barked the last word at her, loud and sharp, his face suddenly projected into hers. She fell backward and sat on her heels.
"Ted! How horrid of you! What does it do?"
"I haven't the faintest notion."
"Are you making it up?"
"Not I. They all made it up. My father, and my grandfather, and the whole tribe. They stuck it into each other, and tried to stick it into me, that whenever one of us is going to die he sees this beastly little hound."
"Ted!" she was clinging to the calf she admired now, in an agreeable ecstasy of shuddering. "I wish I had a ghost, too."
"You shall have mine, with pleasure."
"But why didn't you tell me before?"
"I clean forgot it till this minute. My father told me about it when I was quite a little chap."
"But is it true, Ted?"
"Of course it isn't."
"And did they really see it?"
"They said they did. You may bet your life they didn't."
When he was ready to walk round the little domain he had inherited from his father, Elinor accompanied him to the gate. "I wouldn't have a little white dog for a ghost!" she said to him, slightingly, as they parted. "Anyone could have as good a ghost as that if they tried!"
"Everyone couldn't have an ancestor who had tortured one to death to spite his wife!" he said.
"You can see a dozen little white dogs any day," she taunted him.
"I saw one more than I wanted yesterday when I was out with my gun," he admitted. "That new little beast of Anstey's ran in front of me into every field and frightened the birds. I hardly had a shot."
"Tell Bob to keep it at home," advised Nell.
"I must," Ted acquiesced, and went.
In the course of the morning Bob Anstey, who always appeared some time during each day, came in. Elinor found him standing up by the chimney-piece, manipulating the silver calendar.
"You're a day too previous in your calculation," he said. "This isn't the eighteenth, but the seventeenth, madame."
"Well, how funny!" Elinor cried. "Now I wonder how Aunt Carrie is! I shall have to tell Ted the year isn't up, after all."
To Anstey that was rather a cryptic utterance, but he asked for no explanation. These two were full of little jokes, of allusions, of reminiscences, interesting to them, in which he had no part, close friends as they were.
"Can you spare Ted to me for an hour or two this afternoon?" he asked.
"She could not," she said, smiling; "she could never spare Ted."
"Then come along with us yourself, madame. I want Ted's opinion of that mare I've got my eye on at Wenderling. Your ladyship's opinion would be of value, too."
"Ted has nothing to ride. Did you hear that his horse had wrenched its shoulder yesterday? A wretch of a little dog ran out of a cottage and got mixed up with Starlight's feet. Ted jerked the horse round to spare the dog—and Starlight is as lame as a tree."
They would bicycle then, he decided. The roads were good. They would get into Wenderling in time for tea, and take it easy, coming home in the dusk. They must remember to take lamps. They would start at three.
She agreed to all arrangements, swaying herself idly in the rocking-chair Ted had bought for her; a pretty slip of a girl with a happy, almost childish face. Anstey little thought as he looked at her how often and often through all his life he would with his mind's eye see her so again!
As he was going through the door she called a laughing reproach to him. "Your abominable dog spoilt my husband's sport yesterday, Mr Anstey. Why do you keep such a wretch?"
"Which dog?" he asked, pulling up, smiling at her.
"Your horrid little white dog."
"I haven't got a little white dog," he said, and laughed, and went away.
After all, Elinor did not share the expedition to Wenderling; for at lunch-time it came on to rain, and Ted would not let her get wet. He was proud of seeing her rough it sometimes; he delighted to take her hunting on days when no other lady was in the field, to see her face, rosy and eager, her bright hair darkened with the wet, the raindrops hanging on her hat. He kept her beside him, standing silent and patient in a certain soppy, sodden spot by the river, waiting for the chance of a wild duck flying homeward above the low-lying mists of the fens. What did not hurt him could not harm her, in her youth and strength and spirit, he thought.
"She has the pluck and the staying power of a man," he was proud to tell Anstey; but was proud, too, now and again, to exercise his new prerogative of taking care of the wife who was such a recent, dear possession. Quite unexpectedly, he would veto some proceeding she proposed.
"I won't have you doing it," he would say with dignity. And she was equally proud to obey.
"Ted says I mustn't," or "Ted says I may." What, in those golden hours, did it matter which?
She walked with him, bareheaded, through the drizzling rain to the house where the bicycles were kept, and felt the tyres with him, and rubbed a spot of rust off the handle bar, and walked beside him again, he pushing the machine, down the drive to the road.
"It's a beastly day," Ted said, with an eye cocked at the low-hanging, steel-coloured clouds. "If Bob wasn't so keen on my seeing this horse, I'd chuck it and stay with you."
"Come home soon," she begged him; and, "You may be sure I shall come as soon as I possibly can," he promised her.
"It wasn't Bob's dog that bothered you the other day," she told him as he stood ready to mount, his foot on the pedal; "Bob hasn't got a little white dog."
"It must have been that brute that ran out from Barker's under Starlight's feet the other day, then," he called, and was off.
Nell stood by the gate and watched him till he joined his friend, and, in spite of the faster falling rain, she watched him still. Before they reached the bend of the road Ted turned his head; she waved a gay hand to him, and he, hesitating for a moment, wheeled round and bicycled back.
"Did you call me, Nell?" he said.
Of course she had not called.
"Bob knew you hadn't, but I thought I heard you call; and then you held up your hand and beckoned me."
"Nonsense! Nothing of the sort!" she laughed. "Be off, Ted. I shall never get you home again if you don't start."
"You'll have me home in a twinkling," he promised. And in a flash was gone.
She turned and ran back, with head bent beneath the downpouring rain, light-hearted, to her home, not knowing, never guessing that on that handsome, smiling, healthy face of her young husband she had looked her last.
For when, a couple of hours later, borne on men's shoulders, he was carried to his home, he was so crushed and mangled out of his likeness as his wife had known him that, even by force, they prevented her from looking upon him.
When time had elapsed—Elinor, for some part of it mercifully numbed or unconscious, could not have told if hours, days or weeks—Bob Anstey, at her request, was brought to her. He had been in waiting, knowing that, sooner or later, that meeting, if they did not die with the pain of it, must be lived through.
He had expected to see her lying helpless and strengthless with hidden face. She was standing up against the darkened windows at the end of the long room furthest from the door. He started, walking slowly, almost as if he was groping his way, among the familiar chairs and tables, in her direction. But when half the space was traversed, and she still stood there, uttering no word, dully watching him, his courage failed, and he stopped short. It was the sight of Ted's chair, his pipes on the bracket beside it, the picture of him, smiling, in the silver frame on the mantelpiece, which unmanned him. He had prayed that he might have strength to support the girl-widow in this interview; and he found himself suddenly giving way before her, sobbing like a child; while Elinor looked on tearlessly from afar, dangling the tassel of the window-blind in her hand.
When at length he somewhat mastered his grief and looked up, she had come quite close to him, but she did not speak.
"I thought you might like to hear," Anstey said, in sorrow-muffled voice; and she nodded her head for him to go on.
"He—talked of you nearly all the way," he began. "He said how——"
She stopped him. "Not that," she said, "not yet. The other—the other!"
By some instinct he knew what she meant. "It was going down the Wenderling Hill," he said, "just as we got into the town. You know that steepish hill? Halfway down was a brewer's waggon. We were going at a good stroke, not saying anything, for the moment. We got up to the waggon. 'There's that infernal white dog again,' he said. And I heard him call loudly, 'Get out of the way, you brute!' He swerved violently on one side, as if the dog were in his path—I don't know how it happened; God knowswhyit happened!—he was flung right under the wheels. He—thank God, he did not suffer, Nell, or know a moment's terror or regret. He died instantly."
Elinor was silent for long. She sat, with brow clasped tightly in both hands, looking intently upon the carpet at his feet, trying, he thought, to understand, to get into a mind too confused to work receptively what he was saying to her. Presently, still tightly holding her head, but with more of comprehension in her face, she looked up.
"And the dog?" she asked him. "The little white dog?"
"It's a strange thing about the dog," he told her slowly. "There wasn't one!"
IT ANSWERED
"And besides all that, the poor little woman is ill," he said. "She didn't complain much, but she looked like a ghost to-day."
"What is the matter with her now?" his wife asked.
She was lying back in her chair as if she, herself, were a little tired, and her long white hands busied themselves with four knitting-needles from which depended the leg of a knickerbocker-stocking intended for the shapely limb of Everard Barett.
He looked quickly at her with an air of suspicion and offence. "Now?" he repeated. "What does 'now' mean, spoken in that tone? I don't want to talk about Vera if you don't want to hear. You call the little woman your friend, and ask in that tone, 'What's the matter with hernow?'"
Mrs Barett knitted on in silence during the agitated minute in which her husband kicked away the chair on whose seat his feet had been stretched, sat up, punched the cushion behind him three times with a vicious fist, and, finding it even then fail intelligently to support his head, flung it across the room.
"'Matter with hernow!'" he snorted to himself, in a tone as unlike that mimicked as possible.
"Vera seems to be generally full of complaints, that's all," the wife said.
He gave her a furious glance, and stretched a hand backwards for the newspaper that lay on the table behind him. "We will change the subject," he said, loftily.
"She has her husband, who is devoted to her," Mrs Barett reminded him, disregarding the remark.
For answer the man moved impatiently, and angrily slapped one of his slippered feet over the other.
She smiled upon her knitting. "I daresay her husband isn't the style of man you admire, but he is devoted to her all the same," she said.
"Pappy idiot!" Mr Barett ejaculated. He worked himself deeper into his chair, and held his newspaper before his face.
His wife knitted on, and presently said, as if of the outcome of her thought, "I will go in and see Vera to-morrow, of course."
The newspaper rustled defiantly as it was turned over.
"You know very well, Everard, if Vera is really ill there is no one more sorry than I. Of course, I shall not neglect her."
He was mollified by that, and lowered the paper sufficiently to gaze over the top of it into the fire. "It would be rather unfair if you did; and, considering all the little woman did for you when baby was born, a little like ingratitude into the bargain," he said. "You can't have forgotten all she did?"
No. She had not forgotten, Mrs Barett admitted.
"Here every day of her life, and sometimes all day long—neglecting her own home, and——"
"I remember perfectly, dear," said Lucilla. "What of it?"
Her husband repeated the question in a tone of exasperation, got up, threw away his newspaper, fidgeted about the room, moving the chairs out of his way, staring at the ornaments. "What of it?" he asked. "I suppose, knowing she was there, and seeing after things—saving me bother in giving orders, coming between me and that infernal nurse, and so on—was a comfort to you, wasn't it?"
Mrs Barett, intent on her knitting, made no reply.
His position was strong; he repeated his question: "Wasn't it, I say?"
"It was a comfort to you, I suppose," Lucilla said, then. "We will leave it there."
He gave her a quick glance, angrily questioning. He had temporarily anchored against the fender now, and stood with his heels on it, his hands in his pockets.
"I suppose that it was a comfort to me was something, at any rate?" he asked. He shrugged an angry shoulder. "I was the one that had to go through the misery of it, I know that. I shan't easily forget the time before, when Billy was born, and I was shut up for a solid three weeks with your mother! Heavens! going about with a face like a funeral! Looking at me as if I was a monster every time I took up my hat to go out! I should think Vera Butt was a comfort to me! It wasn't as if you had been really ill. You know you were always saying you wanted to get up and come downstairs to be with us, weren't you?"
"I certainly should have liked better to be with you," Lucilla admitted.
"Well, and Vera said, 'Here's Luce lying tucked up as jolly as a sandboy, why shouldn't we be jolly too?'"
"Exactly; and she wasn't fretful, or complaining, or hysterical once, all the time, was she?"
His thoughts travelled back over the memories of the weeks of which they spoke; the weeks in which he had first begun to find Vera attractive. He saw the face which in that time he had, not without surprise, discovered to be pretty; he thought of the fun they had made between them, and heard her chattering, gay voice, and listened to their mingled laughter. A smile moved his lips for an instant; he looked up, caught his wife's eye, and had a sudden feeling of looking foolish in her sight.
"She was a good little woman, when we wanted her, and I'm sorry if she's ill. That's all," he said. "The Butts aren't very well off, and she doesn't get the comforts a woman wants in illness."
"I'll go and see after her to-morrow," Lucilla said.
It had become the custom of Everard Barett to go for a stroll the last thing at night, to get a "mouthful of air before turning in," as he said. When, later on this evening, he looked in upon his wife before starting for his walk, he found her standing by the hearth, gazing thoughtfully down into the fire.
"If you're thinking of dropping in at the Butts," she said, "you might take a few grapes to Vera. There are just a couple of bunches left. Shall I get them?"
He was putting himself into his topcoat, and he reddened a little with the exertion. "Oh, grapes?" he said; "I took them this afternoon. I saw them standing about, and——"
"Oh, that's all right," Lucilla said. "So long as she had them! And is that where the violets went? I wanted some in, to-day, and gardener said they had all been gathered out of the frame. Did you take the violets, too, to Vera?"
"I daresay I did," said Everard, turning his back.
"You daresay?"
"Well, I did, then. How should I know you wanted them, or that there was going to be a piece of work about a handful of violets?"
With that he went, and pulled the door to with a slightly unnecessary emphasis.
Everard Barett was the sleeping partner in a large manufacturing firm in that provincial town. He drew his comfortable income from this source, but had very little else to do with the business; and so it was that time hung heavily on his hands. Yet, every now and then, a business zeal would seize him, or a weariness of doing nothing, and he would have himself driven down to the great malodorous factory by the river, to put away a few hours. From thence he would return in a far more cheerful spirit than was his on his unoccupied days.
On the morrow of the above conversation he came back from such a dutiful visit, and going into the drawing-room in search of his wife, he found, lying on the sofa drawn up to the fire, not Lucilla, but the lady who of late had dwelt so dangerously in his thoughts—Vera Butt.
She had assumed a charming attitude, which she only changed to throw out a welcoming hand as he came forward. "Here I am," she said. "It's really me. Isn't Luce an angel?" She smiled at him, showing all her teeth, stretching back her head on the pillow to bring her full, round throat into prominence, shutting her eyes. "Oh, it is good to be here!" she said.
It was good to see her there, he murmured, but not without a little embarrassment. For, it is one thing for a man to make love to another man's wife during a half-hour's call at her house, and another to do the same when she has taken up a permanent position in his own wife's drawing-room.
"I'm to stay here till Fred comes back," Vera told him, opening her eyes upon him. (Fred was the husband.) "He won't be home for another fortnight, at least. Are you prepared to tolerate me for a fortnight?"
He thought he was, he smiled; he sat down on the divan not far from her sofa and gazed at her in a rather shamefaced way.
"In a company of three, one must bede trop. I only hope it won't be me," she said.
She was such a nice little woman! With anyone else he might have thought it "good cheek" to imagine it possible his wife or he could bede tropin their own house.
"What talks we'll have!" she went on. "Do you remember when Luce was ill we laughed so loud at some ridiculous thing you said when we were going up to her room that the horrid nurse came out and was rude, and asked us to be quiet?"
Everard remembered the occasion with resentment. It was he who had made the witty remark, certainly, but it had been Vera who had boisterously laughed.
"I never laugh, at home," she told him. "And if Fred does, I am ready to fly. I can't bear any sudden noise. Luce is going to have nurse take the babies always down the back stairs, for fear I should hear them as they come out and in. She has given orders they're not to come into this part of the house at all while I'm here."
"Of course not," Everard said. But he thought of his little Billy, who was two years old, and who was allowed to spend half an hour with his father twice each day. His son was very near to his heart. He wondered how he should make up to Billy for those lost half-hours.
"It is delightful!" Vera said. "I think I should like to lie here for ever, only the firelight to see by, and you sitting just there to talk to me."
"We mustn't talk if it hurts your head," Everard said, with tender caution.
"Well, you to sit there and keep silence, then," she amended.
The divan was not very comfortable. He could not echo her wish that he should sit so, for ever, silent.
"How is the poor head to-day?" he asked.
"It is like fire," she told him. "Feel."
She hitched herself upward, leant on her elbow, and stretched her neck forward, bringing her face within easy distance of his own. What could he do but kiss her forehead?
He had a very gay look when he burst in upon his wife, who was dressing for dinner.
"So you got her here?" he said. "Isn't that giving you a lot of trouble, Luce?"
"We mustn't think of the trouble," Lucilla told him. "I shall not be able to be with her always, but fortunately you and she get on so well——"
"Oh, I daresay I can find time to sit with her, now and then, if that's all you want me to do," he acquiesced, looking down his nose.
"She seems really sadly," Lucilla told him. "Her head is bad, and her nerves—she's all nerves! Then, she has a sort of seizure, now and then——"
"Heavens!"
"Yes. She suddenly becomes, she says, rigid. Can't move hand or foot."
"I say, that must be bad. And what do we do then, Luce?"
"Well," said Lucilla, calmly surveying herself in the glass, and turning her long neck to get a view of her elegant back, "in that case you will have to carry her up to bed, and I shall have to undress her and send for the doctor."
"I carry her!" he said to himself, doubtfully, again and again as he dressed. "She's something of a lump for any man to carry."
He was considered a handsome man by himself and his friends; by no one could he be considered a fine one. Lucilla—he admired her long, graceful figure still—was as tall as he, and he knew himself lacking in muscular strength. "I hope she won't become rigid here," he said.
She had all her meals served in the drawing-room, and she partook of every course, and had a really fine appetite. Plates with biscuits, with grapes, basins with beef-tea, glasses of milk, champagne bottles, were always standing around her sofa.
"It is making rather a piggery of the place," Everard said more than once to his wife.
It was a matter of importance to him, because he found he was expected, both by his wife and Mrs Butt, to spend all his time there. Lucilla, with her nursery, her conservatories, her interest in parochial matters, had never been exacting; he had come and gone without explanation, as it pleased him. But a half-hour unaccounted for came, with Vera, to mean a sulk, to mean tears, to mean, eventually, a nagging such as in all his life Lucilla had never given him. Certainly, if he had prized Vera Butt's society in the days when he could get very little of it, he had his fill now.
A meal being over, Lucilla would say—"I have such and such a thing to do; you go in, dear, and keep Vera amused for an hour." And the hour would stretch to two hours—till the next meal, even. And during that time Vera gave him no rest. She would call upon him incessantly to tell her things, to amuse her.
"Surely something interesting must have happened! Does nothingeverhappen in this house?" she would pout. "You used to say funny things—do you remember how we laughed when Luce was ill? Say something funny now, to keep me going?"
He, with inward resentment, would decline to be funny at command, and she would pass on to the reproachful stage, and so, by easy passage, to the stages of tears and sulks and semi-insensibility; when he would have to dab her forehead with eau-de-Cologne, and rub her hands, or to lift her head higher with his arm beneath the pillow.
"I'm a married man, but I never was called on to do this kind of thing before," he would say to himself.
And at last—"I'm hanged if I'm not getting fairly sick of it," he said.
Then came a day when, before going to his place by the invalid's sofa, he ran up to the nursery and fetched Billy down.
"All nonsense," he said to himself as he carried the child, perched on his shoulder and delightedly holding on by his hair, downstairs. "She screams and cries enough herself; suppose Billy takes his turn!"
"Look here!" he said as the pair entered, "here's Boy Billy come to see you."
Boy Billy struggled down from the paternal shoulder, ran across the room as fast as his fat legs would take him, and with a delighted cry of "mummy! mummy!" hurled himself upon the lady on the sofa. To fly back to his father, with outflung arms and a scream of terror, when, instead of the fair, blooming face of his mother with the auburn waves of hair, the sallow cheeks, the tossed black hair, the great dark eyes of Mrs Butt met his infantile gaze.
The howl that Billy gave in the first pang of that disappointment was certainly out of place in a sick-room. Everard, with one glance at the figure on the sofa, flinging itself into a sitting posture, and gazing at him in an outraged frenzy, caught his boy in his arms and fled with him upstairs.
"My's mummy! My's mummy! Billy wants my's mummy!" the child screamed.
His mummy was sitting over the fire in her own room, and her husband, bursting in, deposited Billy on her lap. The sobs died away against her breast, but Everard went down on his knees and smoothed and patted the beloved little head, and talked the foolish language of consolation his fatherhood had taught him.
"Ugly lady!" the child cried, in his broken voice. "Not Billy's mummy—ugly lady!"
"Billy's is a pretty mummy, isn't she, darling?" the man tenderly said.
"Billy's mummy loves her precious boy," Lucilla murmured.
"'Oves daddy, too," the child sobbed, feeling the father's touch.
She smiled upon the kneeling young man. "Loves dear daddy, too," she said.
It had been only a foolish flirtation—just the snatching at something to fill his empty days. Everard Barett's heart had been his wife's all along. He knew it for a certainty, looking at the woman and her child together, kneeling before them, with a sudden conviction of his own unworthiness, and folly, and absurdity.
"We all love each other, little man," he said. "If we three stick together, we're all right, Boy Billy—we're all right, Luce."
He got upon his feet presently. "I'm going to the Works this afternoon, dear," he said. "And after dinner I thought I'd go in and take a hand at bridge with the Worleys. I'm afraid you'll have rather a time of it, poor old girl."
"I'm afraid you will, when you come home again," Lucilla said.
He dropped his voice to a whisper. "I say, haven't we had almost enough?" he asked. "A fortnight's a deuce of a time! She's all very well, but it's jollier when we're alone, Luce. I want us to be alone again."
When he came home to dinner, his wife met him in the hall. "Everard," she said, "it's come."
"In the name of heaven, what?"
"The Rigor.Youknow. She can't move. Can't stir hand nor foot. All the afternoon she was in a terrible way, crying, and—well, actually fighting me. Then the Rigor came on."
"I'll run for the doctor," he said. He had an aghast face.
"All done. He's here. He's waiting for you to carry Vera to bed."
"Let him carry her himself!" Everard said, fiercely. "Look here, I'm best out of this. I'll go and dine somewhere."
"My dear, you can't run away like that," she said, and, of course, prevailed.
It was as Lucilla had said. Vera was rigid. She looked up at Everard with a smile of satisfaction at that fact. "What do you think of me now?" it seemed to ask. "Am I the sort of woman to turn your back on, and neglect?—a woman who at once becomes as stiff as a broomstick?"
"She must be got upstairs and undressed," the doctor said to Barett.
"Lean on me and try to walk," Barett implored the patient.
She gave a defiant smile. "If my life depended on it I could not move a toe," she said.
"If I took her head, and you her feet?" Everard suggested to the doctor—a plan at once negatived by Vera.
"I won't be carried in that fashion," she said. "I am not a long woman, like Luce," she added. "Fred carries me with perfect ease."
"I think you can manage it, Mr Barett," the doctor said.
There was no help for it. Everard stooped to the task. He ought to have been a happy man, perhaps, with that burden in his arms. It was not as such he described himself to his wife afterwards.
Halfway up the stairs he tripped, and she screamed.
"Grip me! Grip me! Don't let me drop over the balusters!" she called.
He laboured on, the cords bursting in his forehead, his legs bending, his throat swelling, his arms two seats of agony. Lucilla, who had gone before, cleared the mats out of his way. "It isn't much farther," she whispered.
"He is not grasping me right," Mrs Butt cried in a terrified voice. "It's not how Fred grasps me. I am as easy as a child when he carries me. Oh! I shall drop—he is going to let me drop!"
He thought he was, but made a superhuman effort, and tottered on. Having reached level ground he stopped, then started on again with a staggering run. In piloting her through the bedroom door he banged her head against the frame, and Vera gave a howl of rage and pain.
The next minute she found herself hurled upon the bed.
She remained as she fell, upon her face, uttering suffocating moans of angry shame and misery.
Everard waited not a second to watch her there. He reeled from the room, and reaching the landing again, sank down there, ignominiously, sitting on the carpet, his back to the wall, a wreck of his spruce, dapper self, having bodily and spiritually reached the bounds of endurance.
They telegraphed for her husband. "Let him come and take her home, and carry her himself!" Everard said, savagely. "It's his place to carry her, not mine. We've done our part—let her go."
He came as soon as the train could bring him. Lucilla was able to tell him truthfully that his wife had lain and called upon his name all night.
"He is kneeling by her bedside and kissing her, and crying over her," Lucilla told her husband, running down to him, her own eyes wet with tears. "Isn't it a mercy he loves her so?"
"There's nothing whatever the matter with her, you know," Everard said. "The doctor's just been telling me. Nothing whatever."
"I knew that all along," Lucilla told him.
He took her hand and looked in her face, and his own grew red. "Confession is good for the soul, and you and I should have no secrets, Luce," he said. "That little woman upstairs—you'll think me an awful ass. She and I—she——"
Lucilla nodded, without looking at him. "I knew that all along, too," she said.
"You knew? Yet you asked her here?"
He held her before him, and looked in her face, and kissed her.
"I don't believe any other woman would have done that. That was a risky thing to do, Luce," he said.
"But it answered," Lucilla said to herself as she turned away.
TO BERTHA IN BOMBAY
He is a big, heavily-made, healthy-looking man of young middle-age. He came into the coffee-room as I was sitting at breakfast, and having looked slowly round the room, he placed himself with much deliberation opposite me, at the little table which I had secured to myself. The act did not prejudice me in his favour. There was room and to spare at a large centre table where a dozen men were sitting; two of the smaller tables were empty. There was something about him I need not bore you by describing which stamps the colonial man. From such, one knows what to expect. He called for a carte and ordered porridge and a sole, and they were some time in bringing his breakfast.
However, as you know, I have not arrived at thirty years without having learnt to endure a prolonged gaze with perfect appearance of indifference.
"I hope you have no objection to my sharing your table?" he said; and I replied, as I went on with my meal, that I had none.
"You have an open window, and a view of the sea," he remarked, and I assented, and added that on such a morning these things were desirable.
Then his porridge came, and I proceeded with my toast and marmalade, and the letter I had from you in Bombay, which lay beside my plate. Your writing is never too legible, Berthalina, and my head and eyes were aching, that morning, and I felt less rested than when I had gone to bed. My limbs ached too, and while I looked at those crossed lines of yours, without gathering the sense of what I read, I was wondering if, in the broiling heat of this sultry weather, I had taken cold, and was going to be laid up in this strange place, alone in a hotel. Have I told you that, since the cramming for this last horrid exam. has sent me, to an extent, off my mental equilibrium, I have a constant terror of falling ill? It was that which had given me such a fit of horrors when I saw my bedroom, the night before. Here, by the orders of a peremptory doctor, for change of air and the sea-breeze, I find myself, after vainly tramping the town for lodging, in a tiny back room of a huge hotel, with a window which will only open two inches at the top, and a ceiling and four walls crushing in on me like the lid and sides of a coffin! For prospect, I have a window like my own, at about five yards' distance, a few feet of red brick, and a leaden water-pipe!
If I were to be ill in this hole! The fear of it kept me awake and feverish for hours; but falling asleep at last, I had the most vivid and delicious dream. I felt myself irresistibly called by something—I don't know what, the murmur of the sea, perhaps; and I thought I escaped from that entombment, and walked in my night-gown down a long corridor, to a door at the other side of the house. The door yielded, in that ridiculous way in which all obstacles yield in dreams, and I went through a room which I should know again among ten thousand rooms, to the window—a big window thrown wide open; and through it the sea—the sea—the sea! Such a sea! As effulgent, moon-silvered, glorious, as we may look on in Paradise, Berthalina, if God hears the "silly sailor-folk," as Kipling has undertaken that He will.
Ah! The sea, as revealed by the coffee-room window, sparkling in sunshine, dotted with fishing-boats, the white bathing-machines defining its margin, is but a vulgar thing, compared with the sea of my dream.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" The man opposite put the question quite unconcernedly, but I was back in the description of your triumphant dinner-party, and was unpleasantly startled. I answered with a little temper, therefore, that of course I believed in them; and I did not encourage him to further conversation by a glance in his direction.
Had I seen any? he inquired; and I answered "Hundreds." After a minute, repenting of my incivility, I put your letter down, and told him that that was why he saw me getting my breakfast before him. And I even explained—for why need a self-respecting woman be disagreeable even to an unknown colonial in an ill-made flannel suit, and with rough hair?—that I had been working too hard lately, and that the shades of people, dead or in distant lands, well-known and half-forgotten, had taken to appearing before me, when I lifted my eyes from my book.
"In fact, I have come here to get rid of ghosts," I told him; and he said he hoped I had not come to the wrong place. "Why, you surely don't think 'The Continental' haunted?" I inquired.
Then he told me, with an appearance of perfect gravity, that a ghost had visited him last night.
"It is just possible thatmyghosts have lost their way in this bewildering place and have strolled in to you, by mistake," I suggested.
"You don't happen to have seen any since you came here?"
"I only came last night."
"And you didn't see one?"
"No! Do I look as if I had?"
"Not the ghost of a terrified man, for instance, flying up in bed?"
"Good gracious, no! Why?"
"I thought you might have done," he said, and went on with his breakfast.
You'll say he talked such nonsense to get me to look at him, Berthalina; and of course I did. He has not the appearance of a seer of ghosts: a huge, heavy man, with a hump on a big, characterful nose; a powerful jaw, and very quick, blue eyes beneath shaggy eyebrows. The talk of ghosts seemed out of place on such firm lips.
"Was your ghost that of a terrified man, etc.?" I asked him, in spite of myself.
He gave a vigorous shake of his head. "Thank heavens, no!" he said. "In that case I shouldn't have given it two thoughts."
"Of what then?"
"Of a beautiful woman."
He spoke with much deliberation, and his eyes upon my face were serious.
"What was she like? Describe her."
He turned away to reach a bit of bread from a neighbouring table. "She was very much like you," he said.
You may be sure I let him see then that he had gone too far.
I was standing by the door of my disgraceful little bedroom, dressed for walking, when I saw him again. He was mounting the broad stairs with his head bent, and not wishing to pass the man on my way down, I waited till he had disappeared within the door of his room. That door, with the width of the house between, was directly opposite mine. As it opened, there came to me the first glimmer of the light which was to burst on me in all its terrible force a minute later.
When he had reappeared, in his great loose grey flannels, his straw hat on his head, a book in his hand, and had gone downstairs, I flew along the corridor and pushed open the door of the room he had left. Berthalina, it was the room of my dream! Those details which had impressed themselves so clearly on my sleeping vision last night were here in the flesh—well not exactly in the flesh, but—. I stood at the window, wide open from the bottom; the sea lay sparkling in the sunlight—
Of course, you remember the time when I stayed with you, my dear friend, after that crisis in my stupid life of which you and only one other knew? You haven't forgotten how I terrified you nearly to death by walking in my sleep to your room? and how, afterwards, you insisted on keeping the key of my bedroom door under your own pillow? To the best of my belief I have never sleep-walked either before or since that time. The certainty came to me now, as I stood at the man's window, that I had done it again last night!
"And what have you been doing with yourself, all day?"
I had turned my back on the pier bands, on the crowds of the esplanade, and had wandered as far as my legs would carry me along the beach—a hard, smooth beach of yellow sand—and was sitting there, with only the waves for company, when the voice of the man I had successfully dodged all day spoke at my back.
"You were not at lunch, nor at the table d'hôte, to-night," he added; and I did not consider that the statement demanded comment.
He came and sat beside me, and gathered up his knees into his arms and looked out to sea. "I suppose the beach is free to all?" he remarked; and my silence did not gainsay him.
"I am like you," he went on: "I care nothing for all that," he jerked his head in the direction of the town and the populace. "I'm never afraid of my own company. And you?"
"I prefer it to all other company," I assured him, and told the lie with the acrimony of truth.
"And you have been by the sea all day?"
"I have been tramping the town looking for rooms."
"You are not comfortable at the hotel?"
"I prefer apartments."
"Perhaps for a young woman, alone, it is better."
Now for my opportunity.
"I have not been alone until this morning," I told him steadily. "My sister left me by the early train; before breakfast."
"You probably miss her very much?"
"I do. She scarcely ever leaves me. We have everything in common. She is my twin-sister. You could scarcely tell the one from the other, apart."
The information did not flow from me as I desired, but was, rather, gasped out—or so it seems to me on looking back.
I felt him turn his eyes on me—they look absurdly blue and youthful in his sun-reddened, middle-aged face—but I think I mentioned this before. You know how I love a man's hair clipped to the bone, Berthalina? My dear, this one wears his in a mop! I must admit, however, it is a soft kind of hair, and does not arrange itself badly.
"We even share the same bed," I went on. I had to twist my fingers together painfully to maintain the necessary levelness of the indifferent voice. "But that is a matter of precaution."
"Of precaution?"
"My sister is—a sleep-walker," I said, and waited, with the sound of the sea and the band and the multitude in the near distance booming in my head. "Even last night—I awoke to find our door open," I added. "She had wandered in her sleep."
I had said it; but I declare to you, Berthalina, the effort left me weak as a baby. Before you make up your mind to a career of perfidy, dear, go through a course of physical training. You want the strength of a Sandow, I assure you.
I waited with inward trembling for his comment. He made none, but pointed out to me instead the colour of the brown sail of a little fishing-boat almost stationary on the placid sea, the light of the sinking sun upon it. A big steamer came into sight upon the horizon-line. A bare-legged man, pushing a shrimping-net before him, waded through the shallow waters, close inshore.
"This is very pleasant," he said. "You did not mention if you were successful in obtaining rooms?"
I shook my head. "But I leave here in four days."
"And until then?"
"I must remain at the hotel—where I think it is about time I returned."
He rose, as I did. "Have you any objection to my walking at your side?" he asked, and walked there without waiting for permission. "I am a lonely man, and a stranger here," he volunteered. "And you?"
I told him that I was used to being alone; that there was no one now belonging to me—
"With the exception of your twin sister who never leaves you," he reminded me, and went on at once to tell me of his life, which had been passed for many years in Australia. His sister who lived with him died there eight years ago, he is forty years old, he has made money, and has come home for a holiday.
All this, and much more I learnt. He seems quite eager to impart personal information—or perhaps I did not learn it all then, but afterwards. For there has been no getting away from the man, Berthalina; you may believe that my will was good.
At night, I got the chambermaid to lock me in that atrocious little cabin of mine. (Oh, I know you are laughing, Berthalina; good gracious! what a fool I feel about it all.) I knew that he was an early riser, and I did not go down the next morning till I felt sure that he would be enjoying the sea-breezes, and that the coffee-room would be nearly empty. There he was, patiently keeping guard over the table in the window! He strode across to me (he is so huge and self-assured and important-looking, that everyone turns to watch him, and the waiters fly at a glance). "I have kept our table," he said, "and I have taken the liberty to order for you the same breakfast you had yesterday."
After that, I gave up trying to avoid him. I had put everything right in his mind, and it was only for four days! Then I must be getting back, and looking out for ways and means to earn the money I have borrowed to pay my fees and keep me at the hospital. Oh dear! How it all weighs on my mind!
"And so you are going to be a doctor?" he said once, I don't know at which meeting. How can I tell—there were so many!
"I am a doctor," I corrected him.
"Well, I am a doctor too," he said. "And perhaps that is the reason I loathe the thought of any woman meddling in that profession."
"I don't particularly like it myself," I told him. "It was necessary for me to be something, and I had enthusiasm enough to begin with; but——"
"What is your sister?" he asked me suddenly; it took me by surprise, but I told him, with blushes, that she was a doctor too.
"I wonder what my brother will say to that?" he pondered. "You look surprised. Is there any reason I should not have a brother? He is a doctor like myself, and shares my prejudices."
"Those prejudices don't affect my sister," I took courage to remark.
"They should. No decent woman can afford to despise the prejudices of a decent man. The place of a young and beautiful woman is not——"
"I did not tell you she was young or beautiful. I—she—we are thirty years old; and 'pretty,' 'interesting,' 'fine-looking,' are the most complimentary epithets which have ever been applied to us."
"We don't all see with the same eyes," the man said.
It was on our last evening that I sate on a chair in the hotel gardens; he came and smoked his cigar beside me.
"You go to-morrow?" he said.
I nodded.
"And you don't purpose to tell me where you go?"
I shook my head. How can I have him coming to my place with that story of my sister—?
"So here, for ever, we say good-bye. I go back to my practice in Sydney; and you——?"
I said nothing to fill up the pause.
"Four days!" he mused, and was silent.
The band was playing on the pier; the strains of that pretty thing Hayden Coffin sings inThe Greek Slavecame sorrowfully to us across the sea and the sand. The people in their smart seaside costumes went trooping past.
"Not a face I know in all these thousands," he said, and waved the hand which held the cigar to include pier, parade, beach. "Not a face known to you. Under such circumstances two people get to know each other in four days as well as in years of ordinary intercourse. When I say good-bye to you, I shall feel that I am parting with a very dear friend. A friend I shall hardly know how to replace, or even to live without. After four days! Absurd, is it not?"
"May I tell you about my brother?" This was after a long pause, during which I had been inwardly shrinking from the dreary struggle before me, and wishing—wishing—wishing that life was all holiday. "He is my twin brother. Curious, isn't it? You don't think so? Oh, of course we know there are twin brothers as well as twin sisters; but—. Still, let me tell you a rather curious fact with regard to him.
"The night before that morning when I had the happiness to meet you, he was staying in this hotel—he left by that convenient train before breakfast, you know, the early one—and he had a strange experience. He was lying awake in bed—the moon was very bright, it was that which kept him awake—when the door of his room opened, and a woman, young and beautiful, in her night-gear, with her dark hair, 'straight as rain,' hanging down her back and over her shoulders, and with eyes full of all my brother loves to see in a woman's eyes, came into his room. He is not a nervous man, and he saw at once the woman, who in the moonlight was lovely as a vision, walked in her sleep. He held his breath, fearing to disturb her. She went to the window, stretched out her arms to the sea, bathed her hands and her adorable face in the moonlight, drank in, in grateful breaths, the cool sea air, and passing silently through his room, left him as she came.
"You think that an interesting experience for my brother, do you not? But I have not quite finished.
"My brother is a man not without sentiment, although he has attained to middle life without marrying. He has more sentiment, in fact, than in his young days, when he decided it was best for man to live alone. He has seen cause to doubt the wisdom of that creed. He is not without regrets and longings, thoughts of what might have been, and what might yet be. Fairly successful and happy in his career, he has yet come to think that a woman's love and companionship are perhaps just those things he has missed which might have crowned his life.
"Having arrived at such a pass, he was moved by that vision of the night—mightily moved. And he swore to himself that the woman who had come to him like that—a living, breathing, beautiful woman, and yet almost in an angel's guise—was the woman he would seek out and marry, if he could prevail on her to have him.
"Tell me what you think of that resolve of my brother's," he asked me presently. He turned from watching the passing crowd and looked for the first time in my face; and then he got upon his feet. "You will perhaps give me your opinion later?" he said. "You will think about it, and let me hear when I come back?"
I did not wait for his coming back. I went to my room and stayed there. I don't know if he looked for me at our table in the window next morning, for I did not go to the coffee-room for breakfast. And by eleven o'clock I was sitting in the ladies' drawing-room—empty as Sahara at that hour—with my hotel bill in my hand, wondering how it was possible that such a little, little holiday should have cost so very much.
Then he came into the room. He sat down opposite to me at the round table, and I saw that he had a telegram in his hand.
"I have bad news for you," he said. "Your twin sister is dead."
"Oh!" I breathed. What could I do but sit there turning red and white, and looking like a fool before him?
"It is a sad and curious coincidence that my twin brother expired at the same instant. What is there for us to do but to console each other?"
He reached out a hand, palm upwards, to me across the table. "You will find life pleasanter as a doctor's wife than as a doctor," he said. "And——"
But I have told you enough till next mail, Berthalina. By that time, perhaps, you will have prepared yourself for the rest of what he said to me, and what I answered.
I wonder if you will think I have been a sensible and self-restrained woman all my life to act like a rash, precipitate fool in the finish?
I wonder!